by Chuck Klosterman

Scribner / Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13 978-1-4165-4418-0
$24.00 Hardcover
Fiction set in small town North Dakota

New York Times Bestselling Author Chuck Klosterman’s First Novel! Order from your S&S rep or your preferred wholesaler. Find out more about this book on the S&S website: www.simonsays.com.

For more information about events with Chuck Klosterman, contact Kate Bittman, Scribner Publicity, 212.632.4951, kate.bittman@simonandschuster.com. The author does not live in the Midwest and is not readily available for in-person events.

Downloads

• Midwest Connections Rebate Form (PDF)
• Full color sign/flyer (PDF)
• Black & white print ad (PDF)
• Author photo (JPG)
• Book photo (JPG)
• Midwest Connections Generic Display Materials

About the Book

“If you’ve ever had any experience in small town living, you will enjoy reading Downtown Owl. Everyone I know who has read my WELL WORN advance copy can recite the names of every character in the book, from the new teacher in town to the football coach. It’s the typical small town with more bars than churches and the new young teacher being hit on by every single guy in Owl. The book ends with an actual weather happening that I experienced in North Dakota, too! It’s a fun read, and I highly recommend it!”
- Carl Wichman, NDSU Bookstore, Fargo, ND

Somewhere in North Dakota, there is a town called Owl that isn’t there. Disco is over, but punk never happened. They don’t have cable. They don’t really have pop culture, unless you count grain prices and alcoholism. People work hard and then they die. They hate the government and impregnate teenage girls. But that’s not nearly as awful as it sounds; in fact, sometimes it’s perfect.

Mitch Hrlicka lives in Owl. He plays high school football and worries about his weirdness, or lack thereof. Julia Rabia just moved to Owl. She gets free booze and falls in love with a self-loathing bison farmer who listens to Goats Head Soup. Horace Jones has resided in Owl for seventy-three years. He consumes a lot of coffee, thinks about his dead wife, and understands the truth. They all know each other completely, except that they’ve never met.

Like a colder, Reagan-era version of The Last Picture Show fused with Friday Night Lights, Chuck Klosterman’s Downtown Owl is the unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it feels to exist in a community where rural mythology and violent reality are pretty much the same thing. Loaded with detail and unified by a (very real) blizzard, it’s technically about certain people in a certain place at a certain time…but it’s really about a problem. And the problem is this: What does it mean to be a normal person? And there is no answer. But in Downtown Owl, what matters more is how you ask the question.

Chuck Klosterman is a senior writer for SPIN magazine. Previously, he was a film and rock critic with The Akron Beacon Journal, and before that with The Forum in Fargo, ND. He did not consciously know it, but Chuck was looking for any chance he could get to move to New York. The publication of his first book, Fargo Rock City, provided him that chance. But, rest assured, new surroundings haven’t changed him a bit. Chuck will always be Chuck, the kid who grew up on a farm in North Dakota listening to Motley Crue. That kid has now written for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Washington Post, Blender, and The Village Voice. He lives disturbingly close to the UN, and you’ll occasionally catch his head talking on MTV and VH1.